There's a nice post on the history of the Morrill Act over at Two Half Hitches: Land Grant Universities: Brought to You by Liberals (Sept. 18, 2011).
The Morrill Act established the countries great land grant universities and led to a vast expansion of the innovative basic research that helped drive the surge of the middle class up to the 1980s.
Since Reaganomics took over, however, public universities, including land grant institutions, get less and less of their funding from the public and must resort to higher tuition, fundraising, grants and, yes, corporate dollars to stay afloat. That change of funding means that there is less basic research and more research that is targeted at potential profit-making enterprises or in support of corporate positions. Students who once knew that higher education could be within their reach at their state's public institutions find themselves priced out of opportunity. The kind of groveling for funds that senior administrators do reinforces their tendency to view themselves as the top of a hierarchy, disdain faculty governance, and consider students their "customers" rather than co-participants in the exploration of learning. And the politicization of grant getting and the funding of public institutions that provide grants, such as NIH, NEH, etc. limits further the kinds of topics that will be explored.
Taxes and spending are linked. We have to consider what our priorities are for what government should support, and surely basic research and higher education generally deserve considerable state and federal funding. And we have to be willing to adopt tax policies that put our money where our mouth is--taxing ourselves to build a better society.
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